A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
@BoydStephenSmithJr How do you find using Haskell in a work setting? I always feel like I'm under time pressure and don't have as much as I would like to think through a design. I'm never satisfied with my Scala code for that reason and I feel like it'd feel even worse with Haskell since it's so much more concise.
Am not familiar with GMDTT, will have to check that out! So many things to learn 🤯
@abucci This is my second Haskell job and I'm sure things will depend on the organization around you, but I just do the first thing that I can think of that "will work", make it as simple / concrete / specialized as possible until I have something that compiles without warnings, and only then do I let myself generalize / abstract things. Try to stick documentation on all new top-level bindings while my motivation is fresh, and allow myself to rewrite later.
"Our principal ambition for this paper is to make invitations to pure mathematicians to consider deploying constraint logic programming systems to assist in research, and to enthusiasts of the logic programming paradigm to consider applying their skills to problems in Lie theory. To this end we narrate a recent adventure searching for new simple Lie algebras over the field F2 = GF(2) of two elements in dialogue with the Prolog programming environment"
Fantastic article on "Why logic programming is the best choice for #authorization" on Gusto's engineering blog. If you're curious to learn the history of #Rego, and why it's built on top ideas from logic programming, #prolog and #datalog, this is a great read.
I've been reading about #Erlang lately. I'm a little disappointed. Erlang seems real good and powerful, but it's not nearly as weird as I thought. I had somehow gotten the impression that it was #Prolog-level weird, but it's only #Lisp-level weird, which is not actually all that weird these days, since everybody else added some functional elements to their languages.
So I was ready to have my mind blown, but instead I only got it expanded.
@MegaMichelle
I don't know. A busy loop, or a wait on a connection that went down, not hanging the system is still uncommon and overly engineered. That is pretty mind-blowing. @ids1024
Does anyone on here know how to make a #backtracking#algorithm faster? I'm writing a #logicprogramming language ala #Prolog in Rust and it's already pretty slow (takes 1.11 seconds to find 20 answers) at even four rules deep and a database with 84 facts. Might it be string comparisons for variable names and such? If so, how would I accelerate that?